Animation · per scene
Movement where it earns its keep.
Animation is applied scene by scene, not to the whole video. A documentary might animate ten key moments and leave eighty as stills — and be better for it.
3×
What an animated minute costs versus a stills minute
5s
Length of each generated clip
Any
Scene can be animated or left still, independently
How it works
From still frame to moving clip
Each animated scene starts as the still image you already approved in the storyboard, and becomes a short clip generated from it. The composition, the character and the style are already settled — animation adds motion to a frame you have seen.
That ordering matters. Animating from an approved still means you never pay to animate a scene you would have rejected.
The trade-off
The honest version
Animated minutes cost roughly three times what still minutes cost, and take substantially longer to generate. That ratio is not a pricing decision — it is close to the real difference in compute.
For plenty of formats, well-chosen camera movement over a strong still reads better than mediocre animation. Stick Stories is a clear example: the style's whole appeal is its stillness, and animating it makes it worse.
Where it pays
When to spend the credits
A reasonable default is to animate under a fifth of scenes, chosen deliberately:
- Establishing shots that set a location the video returns to
- Emotional beats where the narration slows down
- Any moment held on screen longer than about eight seconds
- The opening fifteen seconds, which carry the whole video
What to avoid
Where it is wasted
Scenes on screen for four seconds. Rapid cuts between many scenes. Anything where the narration is doing the work and the image is only there to avoid a blank frame.
Animating those spends three credits a minute to produce something a viewer will not consciously register.